5/10
Made-for-TV pseudo-documentary by Werner Herzog about the Italian composer Gesualdo, famed not only for composing music far ahead of his time but for his life as a prince, a masochist, a murderer (his wife and her lover), an eccentric, and a loner...so right up Herzog's alley then. A lot of the stuff in here is scripted or simply made up by Herzog which is not uncommon in his "documentaries" but I don't think it really works as a means to explore the "ecstatic truths" of Gesualdo as it does in his other documentaries (I'm thinking mainly of Fata Morgana and Little Dieter Needs to Fly). The stuff that's made up doesn't illuminate Gesualdo's life any more for us, it's just distracting as we try to decipher what's real and what's fabricated. At an hour-long, the movie feels too compact to really explore anything in detail, and interviews with scholars and historians slam uncomfortably against rehearsal performances by the Gesualdo company. Gesualdo is an interesting character and I'm glad I got to know a bit more about him but as far as Herzog's documentaries usually go, this one is disappointingly tame.
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